Last week, Sega released an updated version of rhythm game, Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F, on the PlayStation 3, featuring six new songs and new modules for the Vocaloid characters as well. The game sold 110,229 copies in its first week. That isn’t too shabby at all, considering that the original PlayStation Vita version of the game, released in September 2012, sold 159,592 copies in week 1.

Following Project Diva F at the #2 spot on the software sales chart was Soul Sacrifice, Sony’s own take on the “hunting action” genre, following in the footsteps of games like Monster Hunter and God Eater. Sony have been building up to its release for over half a year now, with a variety of promotions and television commercials to help raise awareness of the game.

For starters, every PlayStation Vita sold from January 23rd onwards came with a Soul Sacrifice demo installed on it. Additionally, Sony had Tsutaya, a large retail chain in Japan, rent out free physical copies of the demo as well. This was followed by an announcement that every copy of Soul Sacrificewould come with a free 30-day PlayStation Plus trial. Finally, Sony also announced a PlayStation Vita hardware bundle for Soul Sacrifice, and a double pack containing two copies of the game for a heavily discounted price.

The effort has paid off, but only to an extent. The standard edition and hardware bundles for Soul Sacrifice sold 92,396, and Sony sold another 22,050 copies of the double pack, bringing total first-week retail sales to 114,446. No doubt the game also sold additional copies via download sales, although Sony haven’t announced a figure yet.

Namco Bandai released a PlayStation Vita game last week, too—Tales of Hearts R, a remake of a Nintendo DS game with new 3D visuals and additional playable characters. Tales of Hearts R sold 55,258 copies in its first week. That’s a slight increase over Tales of Innocence R, also a Nintendo DS remake for Vita, which sold 54,853 copies in week 1 at launch.

Meanwhile, PlayStation Vita sales for the week were more or less consistent with the week prior, when Sony dropped the price of the device at 63,581 units sold.

The top-20 chart for the week was as follows:

Lw

Tw

Title

Weekly Sales

Total Sales

Sys.

Publisher

New

01.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F

110,229

New

PS3

Sega

New

02.

Soul Sacrifice

92,396

New

PSV

Sony

New

03.

Uta no Prince-sama: All-Star

67,217

New

PSP

Broccoli

05.

04.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf

63,285

2,802,940

3DS

Nintendo

New

05.

Tales of Hearts R

55,258

New

PSV

Namco Bandai

01.

06.

Dynasty Warriors 8

46,866

250,090

PS3

Tecmo Koei

New

07.

Far Cry 3

33,281

New

PS3

Ubisoft

02.

08.

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacies

30,078

160,764

3DS

Level 5

10.

09.

Dragon Quest VII

24,045

1,159,265

3DS

Square Enix

New

10.

Soul Sacrifice [Double Pack]

22,050

New

PSV

Sony

04.

11.

Dragon Ball Heroes: Ultimate Mission

21,915

110,302

3DS

Namco Bandai

08.

12.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

17,833

386,908

PS3

Konami

03.

13.

Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus

17,138

111,461

PSV

Marvelous AQL

New

14.

Doraemon: Nobita to Himitsu Dougu Hakubutsukan

12,768

New

3DS

FuRyu

07.

15.

Phantasy Star Online 2 Special Package

10,031

71,258

PSV

Sega

New

16.

Crysis 3

9,602

New

PS3

Electronic Arts

06.

17.

Macross 30: The Voice that Connects the Galaxy

9,294

72,383

PS3

Namco Bandai

09.

18.

Shining Ark

9,161

63,999

PSP

Sega

13.

19.

New Super Mario Bros. 2

8,452

1,950,816

3DS

Nintendo

14.

20.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (Best Price!)

8,096

252,737

3DS

Capcom

Note: Next week’s sales data will be made available a day later than usual (March 21st) due to a national holiday, Shunbun no Hi, taking place in Japan on the 20th.

Being a double pack, wouldn’t that really put Soul Sacrifice at 136,000 copies sold? Not from a monetary standpoint, but from actual copies of the game sold.

malek86

Yes, although like you said, revenue would actually be lower than that. Still, I guess it’s a good thing that the players bade goes up. It should be interesting to see how its legs hold up, though I’m not expecting that much (chances are its yearly sales will be less than 300k).

I still think they made a bad call by making the game look as grotesque and horrific as it does. Not a smart move in the least.

malek86

Maybe they were trying to distance themselves from the usual MH fare (remember God Eater 2 is coming out later), while also trying to get a piece of that Dark Souls crowd… probably didn’t work, but to be honest, I don’t think it affected sales that much either.

Well, at any rate, it’s going to be interesting to see how God Eater 2 does. The first one sold close to 700k on PSP. Depending on how much the PSP and Vita versions sell individually, Namco are going to have to start thinking about the series’ future.

malek86

GE2 is very unlikely to sell as much, even on two platforms. That said, I’m ready to be proven wrong.

Soul Sacrifice isn’t going to be replicating any kind of success in the West, if you ask me. There isn’t a large audience for gritty M-rated games on portables in the West, either on 3DS or Vita.

mirumu

I think there is a significant market for M-rated games in general in the west be they portable or otherwise. If anything I think the lack of them on portables is a large part of the reason portables themselves don’t sell so well in the west.

That debate aside, I’d certainly agree that it’s a market publishers have not successfully tapped to date.

I agree, the reason is because no significant strides have been made in that regard. God of War on PSP and Dementium on DS is the closest we’ve come to successes (GoW obviously being far more successful), but those are just one or two titles.

Ultimately, it’s a chicken-and-egg situation that doesn’t look like it’s going to be resolved any time in the near future. Both Vita and 3DS will get a couple of M-rated games, which may or may not be successful, but it isn’t going to cause any kind of shift in market habits.

Xerain

Especially if they actually market it to Mature gamers instead of making commercials featuring 12 year old casual gamers having a blast playing a game that’s way to hard for them.

Lexaus_the_Alchemist

As @malek86 said below, SS is a hunting game but not for the same age audience as MH or GE. Also, weren’t the PSP and Vita supposed to be for a higher age group than say the DS or 3DS?

Also, weren’t the PSP and Vita supposed to be for a higher age group than say the DS or 3DS?

Not at all. The PSP’s biggest seller was Monster Hunter, which shares a large audience overlap with Pokémon. The next biggest sellers on PSP were Square Enix games (primarily FF titles), which were also on the DS. Finally, Dragon Quest, which is a series that literally draws in people ranging from 6 to 60, was entirely DS-exclusive.

DS also got other games that were specifically aimed at an older crowd. Hotel Dusk, Brain Age, Professor Layton. Meanwhile, 3DS got Resident Evil: Revelations just a year after launch.

Whether a game appeals to a “higher age group” tends to be very subjective, and I think the only way of truly judging it is if the publisher reveals market demographics data. I don’t think making a game look gritty and bloody automatically means that it’s going to attract older players.

In fact, in this case, it seems to have hurt more than anything. Soul Sacrifice is on the lower end of hunting-action games, despite all the promotion it’s been receiving. Part of the reason for that is because interest in the Vita in general is low, but I’m confident that the art style played a significant role as well.

Locklear93

I agree. The basic concept is interesting to me, but as a rule, the more gross a game looks, the less interest I have in it. I like my characters and enemies to look intimidating and impressive, not repellant.

BloodTorrent

The game has to look the way it does because of the concept of sacrificing things in order to obtain power. Want some nice, happy, colourful graphics with your ripped-out spine sword? Didn’t think so.

zackner

I think the double pack count how one unit sold because for the price of one you have two. Sould Sacrifice have 136.000 players but I think not 136000 copies sold

No, this is how Media Create is counting it, so this is how we’re reporting it, too. People paid the price of a little over one game and got the second at a very heavy discount in the same box. It counts as more players, yes, but it’s part of the same box (SKU). Doubling the numbers would be tantamount to fabricating sales data because few other publishers are ever going to give a second copy of their game away for free or at such a heavy discount.

mirumu

I see where you’re coming from, although it seems pretty obvious it would only be the craziest of fans who’d buy a double pack just for themselves. In effect they’ve sold near 136,000 copies of the game, but I can understand Media Create’s take on it too. They’re measuring a different thing in effect.

Is it just me though or do you feel these numbers may be lower than Sony was expecting? Obviously we don’t know what Sony’s actual predictions were, and these numbers are still good by Vita standards, but I can’t help but feel they’d be a little disappointed in these numbers given the large promotional effort they made. Perhaps something the sell-through data may shine a light on?

It’s hard to try and imagine what kind of numbers Sony were expecting. Just to give SS the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume it sold 30-40k copies via downloads, bringing total sales up to around 150k first week. (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case)

I don’t see that as a huge success, considering the circumstances the game was released under.

SS has enjoyed luxuries that 90% of games never will. It launched immediately after a price cut, it’s been heavily promoted for six months straight at numerous events and on TV. Demos have been deployed to virtually every new Vita owner for the last two months, with a major retail chain giving away free demo cartridges to existing owners as well. The game saw a hardware bundle and a discounted double pack. And finally, it’s also a Monster Hunter clone, which tend to gain a certain amount of attention just because of genre.

What you said is entirely true. They’re good numbers “by Vita standards”. But how many other publishers are going to make a high-budget game like Soul Sacrifice, let alone promote it as long and as hard? And that’s the problem. SS isn’t a “realistic” sales scenario.

Sell-through-wise, I think the game will have sold through its entire shipment. That’s why I assumed that it sold another 30-40k via downloads. Normally, games don’t see such high download numbers in Japan, but there are exceptions, like when there are shortages at stores.

The problem with sell-through, though, is that it isn’t entirely up to the publisher. Retailers have a big say in it, too. If they don’t think a game is going to sell well, they’ll only agree to take on a certain number of copies. At times, they also influence release dates, like when they asked Imageepoch to push Sol Trigger back, because there was too much other stuff coming out close to it.

mirumu

That’s interesting. If it turns out the game had over 90% sell-through though then Sony surely couldn’t really have expected physical sales numbers higher than this. Sales don’t get any better than selling out. That would seem to be an odd situation for them to allow to happen, although as you say it’s not one entirely within their control.

If that is the case the true sales story would only be visible in the download numbers, and/or in future physical sales. I guess we may not see the true picture for some time in that situation.

AdachiTohru

Nop, its not the price of one game.
Its far to be a copy for free, its just a bit cheaper than buying two copies, its a way to buy the game with friend to save money

You can say 22k of this SKU to report the media create number, but if you want to give the total amount of copies sold, you should precise 136k in the news, and not 114k because the units in the double pack are still sold units.

Should the last week for Tales of Hearts R’s last week position be new?

Anyways, glad to see Soul Sacrifice doing well in its first week and the Vita doing well overall – it just needed the games. I hope Hearts comes to the west, and plenty other Vita titles. The future is looking bright.

The Wii U is going to need those first party titles – like previous Ninty systems – to see a surge in sales.

Totally agree. Though, as we all know, first party titles will get the most out of gamepad, but needs some third party (most likely exclusives) to utilise that gamepad and other features of the Wii U.

Daniel Jeanbaptiste

Lego City Undercover is coming next week.

Demeanor

Glad to see Sony baring her fangs at last (I’m a longtime aficionado). Currently playing ToHR for the first time now, it’s really great ([email protected] XD), and of course the mighty Senran Kagura.
Also, I seem to have misplaced my jaw, it must have fell off yesterday when I was watching the 3D PV for Sweet Devil XD
Project Diva F is absolutely awesome, definitely worth a buy even for owners of the Vita version imho. Can’t wait for Soul Sacrifice and God Eater 2.

DJ.TOMATO

why if top three games are on sony platforms and 13 of the top 20 are on sony too ¿why you put 3DS first?

Because it’s not in ascending or descending order. It’s in the order that the consoles were released. 3DS XL is next to regular 3DS so it’s easier to make sense of their total sales. Regardless of sales, it’s going to be the same every week.

badmoogle

SS sold better than i expected…

fds_nextdart

Actually, I expected it to do a bit better. Not that I’m disappointed by the numbers, but given that there’s a PSV bundle (coupled with the recent price cut) + launch of the game + double pack I expected it to sell more along the lines of P4: The Golden or Project Diva~.

Micrll

Just a heads up if you have a Japanese PSN account there is a demo for Project Diva F available Has 3 songs with beginner and normal difficulty + a few costumes. Definitely worth a download if you are a fan of the games, and have not imported it yet or are waiting for the possible English release.

quasadra

it is on the asia psn too.

Aristides

The Vita outsold the 3DS! Has that ever happened before?? this is awesome :P

Daniel Jeanbaptiste

nope first time won’t last long
Luigi Mansion Dark Moon
Castlevania Lords of Shadow Mirror of Fate Japan Version
Mario Golf World Tour
Mario & Luigi Dream Team
Shin Megami Tensei IV
coming next for 3DS

I agree, though not entirely for the same reasoning. I just feel the people who always told themselves “when the Vita is cheaper, I will get one” finally bought one, and they will run out soon enough. Sony made the right move dropping the price, but for long term growth, they should of gone further. Sadly, Sony won’t actually learn this until they go another 6 months at 10k sales per month. This is a short term spike because memory is still over priced, and the price between a Vita, memory, and a game is still $300+.

Daniel Jeanbaptiste

exactly. This isn’t even worldwide. Vita is still struggling outside Japan. No games are being release outside Japan to boost sales.

When it start performing like PSP then even better than PSP then I get one because then Games will start coming out.

People are acting like one week = 20 devs on board, games coming and beginning of 3DS competition when we been here many times. With pass system.

Ruby Doobie

I hope for the sake of the handheld markets future sales stay strong (but I’m a Nintendo fanboy so I want the 3DS consistently outselling the Vita), that way Michael Pachter would have to shut up about iPhones destroying the handheld market (although I’m sure he would continue doing it). Going from past sales posts there’s a good chance most of the vita sales were people who waited for Soul Sacrifice so I doubt we’ll be seeing these numbers for long but the price cut will keep it above what it used to be.

Christopher Nunes

Seeing how great the Vita is doing I might as well import those games, Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus, Tales of Hearts R, and Tales of Innocence R. I am in need of new Vita games.

Soul Sacrifice I have pre-order already and awaiting pick up next month! Can’t wait! ^_^

sunK1D

Senran Kagura is the most polished game I’ve played on the Vita yet. Def worth it.

Christopher Nunes

Sounds good! And I like Dynasty so a game with similar gameplay is great in my book! ^_^

noctis_nox

I really want Hometown to be localized but if worse comes to worst then I will just import it.
Hoping for the the 2 Tales of localization as well but I won’t import since this is a RPG.

Christopher Nunes

Please it’s good to wait and see if Tales of Hearts R will be localized as the series creator wants ToHR to be localized, but Namco has the word to see that dream become a reality.

noctis_nox

I sure hope so.

Solomon_Kano

Good on Soul Sacrifice. I actually expected a bit more, but this is good. I wonder how it’ll do next week? It doesn’t really seem like the sort of software to have long legs, so it’ll probably get another good 30-50k before dropping lower or off the chart.

As for last week’s Vita games, PSO2 looks to be on its way out of the chart and, in an unsurprising turn, Kagura is falling faster than the 3DS’ Dragon Ball despite its higher debut. I wonder if it’s still seeing a significant number of digital sales?

Locklear93

I think it might have more in the way of legs than you’d expect. The Vita price cut benefits any Vita publisher, but it also means people just paid $200 (I think? Don’t have time to look up the cut price right now), and likely as not bought a game or two with it last week. Between Senran Kagura’s very high sales last week, and a back catalog people may have been interested in, but unwilling to buy until the Vita price drop, there are a lot of new Vita gamers who are probably a bit hurt financially this week, and left waiting on Soul Sacrifice.

Solomon_Kano

A good point. But can we really expect it to be a large enough number that’s specifically going to go after Soul Sacrifice? I see it selling next week, maybe the week after, but I don’t see it being a great amount of people that are going to be trailing the title in the weeks to come. I’m expecting it to do better than Kagura following it’s debut, but not for very long. I suppose we’ll see over the next few weeks.

noctis_nox

Hoping for Demon Soul like legs and I hope it reaches 300K plus mark.

Solomon_Kano

That’d be nice to see for a new IP. Would be encouraging.

noctis_nox

Yeah! and for the 3rd party aswell. I hope Sony keeps on making new IP or just revived their old franchise and release it on Vita. Looking at Dark Cloud and Wild Arms.

Solomon_Kano

I was just telling a friend the other day that Wild Arms returning on Vita would be a perfect move. I’m hoping that’s what Sony giving the original away for the Vita’s anniversary was hinting at. It won’t be lol, but it’d be nice.

Personally, I’d really like to see Sony put the Rogue Galaxy IP back into commission on Vita.

noctis_nox

Yeah I was thinking the same thing when Wild arms was given for free. ^^

It will not sell astronomical but this will definitely fills the holes of dry season.

Rouge Galaxy is awesome too. Space Pirate. I like capturing bugs. lol

Skye Johnson

Reading the comments here on the market of Soul Sacrifice makes me think I’ve held some very strange expectations concerning the game. I’ve been assuming (and still hold onto that thought) that Soul Sacrifice will perform better in the Western crowd (we will see), as I theorized it would cater to the Dark Souls/God of War type of crowd, due to its darker, grittier style.

Honestly though, for how much of a “gore-fest” some advertisements I’ve seen have been trying to make it appear, the gameplay footage I’ve seen from Japanese games don’t really make it seem as much of a bloodbath of a game as I initially thought it might be. Darker, yeah, but not something slapped around with eye-gouging gore?

…Maybe I need to watch more, because for someone who has to be clearly outside the game’s target market, whatever the aimed demographics are, (female gamer here), I actually thought this game looked rather interesting and neat, and I’ve never been interested in the Monster Hunter franchise, or God of War/Dark Souls.

Still, it did pretty well. Not as much as I thought with all the advertising. Regardless of its success, I hope it sees good sales in the West and gives more life to the Vita. I need more games to justify my purchasing of one.

Damn, how hard they were hyping Soul Sack, I feel so bad that it really do THAT great.

psycho_bandaid

Hm. Interesting sales figures for Miku. I figured the game would do better on PS3, but the vita version opened at around 150000. Hopefully sega doesnt freak out, seeing as they werent too please with how the vita version sold.

Guess we’ll see if Soul Sacrifice can sell in Senran Kagura-numbers, or if all the help still can’t give it wings. My gut instinct would be that the Vita crowd would probably like a MonHun game to play with others and as such there may be hope for it still, buuut we’ll see. Kagura seems to have sold much less this week than the one before it, but I do recall that they sold a lot of digital copies last week so it could be the case that this is just a result of the stores running out of copies that Media Create can track. Rising and Layton dip a little but still seem to have legs in them before the end, Tales of Hearts seems to do semi-fine and… what is Uta no Prince and why does it sound so familiar? Must be popular if it can sell in those numbers.

I do expect SS will have a decent tail behind it. It’s a multiplayer game and social-oriented stuff like that generally tends to benefit from word of mouth.

Nicholas Gatewood

How is Soul Sacrifice “taking one for the team”? It’s launching on the best mobile gaming device in the world, no other system could allow such a high-quality game to have been made. The Playstation Vita is right above the 360 in terms of ease-of-use with the devtools, the only platforms that allow for easier game development are the PS4(confirmed) and the next Xbox(not confirmed, could be harder to work with its devkits).

As an indie developer, I’ve gotta say I’m much more excited to develop for the Vita than the 3DS, especially when you consider that most third-party games make more profit on the Vita than the 3DS(with Monster Hunter and Nintendo’s games making up most 3DS game sales and consumer interest spread more evenly across the Vita’s library). I can’t wait for Soul Sacrifice to hit the USA, it looks like it’s making good use of the Vita’s potential.

“Facepalm” Don’t u heard what the creator of Gunman Clive said recently on sells figure in E-Shop?

Tom_Phoenix

You’re taking what is supposed to be a clever reference to Soul Sacrifice’s gameplay a bit too seriously…

Also, it seems like you haven’t been paying attention to these charts for very long, beacuse third-parties have been doing well on the 3DS. Not that the platform is the sole deciding factor in whether or not third-party games sell well (afterall, a good platform doesn’t really matter if the game itself is of poor quality), but the 3DS has become a healthy ecosystem for Japanese developers.

Infact, it’s kind of funny that you mention consumer interests, beacuse if anything, the Vita has been targeting the interests of a single group of consumers (the Otaku crowd). By comparison, 3DS games have been targeted towards a variety of different consumers.

Mrgrgr and Unacceptable World

Nice sells for Vita there.^_^ I think this is the first in recent, Vita outsell 3DS?

And Soul Sacrifice did quite good, even though i predict a bit better due to the big amount of marketting that Sony have done for this title.

The one that i am quite sad is Miku there. The amount sells is even lesser than Vita version there. Hope Sega will not feel bad with that sells and tries to maybe decrease the pace of releasing each Miku game there.

Overall, nice week for Vita there.^_^ And next week is going to be interesting.^_^

BloodTorrent

Vita outselling 3DS, Soul Sacrifice outselling Monster Hunter. MADNESS I SAY! Fortunately it is the best kind of madness and i hope Sony can make it continue long into the future.